Part of our meeting today, we discussed our preferred ways of using the Discussion Board feature in the repository. Although a powerful collaboration tool, there was concern about how prevalent it should be in this environment.
Besides having access to Discussion Groups on all Learning Targets, should there be a place to create ah-hoc or on-going discussion groups on different education-related topics (e.g., math assessment practices, online learning in chemistry)? These could be overwhelming, especially if you were being invited to participate in many. On the flip side, it's an opportunity to collaborate with a targeted group of people around a common interest in education and grow professionally.
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I would like there to be an option where teachers can post questions for "experts" in our district. I know as an elementary teacher, I do not have a masters degree in each of the subject areas I teach in. It would be nice to post questions for other teachers, not necessarily in my grade level, who could respond if interested and without being sent tons of flags or requests.
ReplyDeleteI think that if we are going to use PLCs in our district, or another form of learning communities, it would be nice to use this to have discussions. We need to be able to communicate vertically, as well as horizontally if we want to be able to make effective change. This doesn't require everyone to view and respond, it should allow all interested.
Cheers
I think it is important that we try to be as flexible as possible with the way the discussion boards work. Having the ability to collect information directly related to a specific learning target may work really well for secondary teachers. For the elementary teachers, it may work better to have a more global content area discussion space. I am not sure we will know exactly what will work best until we get into it a bit and test it out. So bottom line, flexibility in design will be critical.
ReplyDeleteThe benefits of teacher talk and collaboration around student work, curriculum ideas, and learning targets are very powerful. I think creating opportunities for these specific discussions within the context of this web space present a win-win scenario for teachers and their students. User choice in discussion participation within a scaleable format will be important, and may help reduce an overwhelming amount of email invitations.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the input. The common theme is the need for flexibility to accommodate all teachers. It's not a secret that a HS teachers' needs are different than an ES teacher. I'm sure this challenge is not new to our vendors. However, we need to remember that our own flexibility and moderate intitial expectations are key to get this off the ground; with the hopes of building it better and smarter as we go along.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Pam that a more global content discussion area at the elementary level would be most helpful at first. Then as people chime in with their questions/needs we may see that more specific discussion areas are needed. I think with the new adoptions that are always occurring a lot of discussions may happen that aren't necessarily related to one Learning Target. I hope there would be a way to go and look at the various topics of discussion without having to get a lot of notices about each posting. If a topic looks interesting to me I'd read it and the postings that go with it, if not I'd ignore it and move on.
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